The present invention relates to an air conditioner having a filter cleaning function for automatically cleaning a stained air filter, further in details, relates to an air conditioner having a filter cleaning function capable of firmly removing dust adhered to an air filter without scattering dust to a surrounding thereof.
An air conditioner (interior unit thereof) is attached with a dust preventing air filter for preventing dust from flowing from an air suction port to inside thereof. Normally, the air filter is attachably and detachably attached to the interior unit and a user cleans the air filter at pertinently timings.
However, since an air conditioner is generally provided at a high place in a room, an operation of detaching the air filter is troublesome and becomes an operation particularly difficult for an aged or female person. Hence, the applicant has proposed an air conditioner automating an operation of cleaning the air filter.
As an example thereof, according to the invention described in Patent Reference 1, an air filter is made to be movable, inside of an interior unit is provided with an air filter cleaning portion in which a cleaning brush is made to be included in a dust box, and the air filter is automatically cleaned by passing the air filter through the dust box.
According thereto, although the air filter can be cleaned without manual labor, there is constituted a structure of passing the air filter through the dust box to thereby scrape off dust adhered thereto by the brush. Here, in order to prevent scraped dust from being carried out from the dust box in accordance with movement of the air filter, a scraper is provided at a filter inlet/outlet of the dust box. Although the scraper is opened in moving forward the air filter and closed in moving rearward the air filter by detecting movement of the air filter, an opening and closing structure thereof is complicated.
Further, although according to the invention described in Patent Reference 1, there is used a special filter constituted by integrally molding a filter having small contact resistance between the filter and the brush and a frame, when the air filter is constituted by an integrally molded product, molding cost is increased. Further, since the air filter is thickened, a draft resistance is liable to be increased.
Although in order to resolve the problems, the problem is resolved by using an air filter expanded with a meshed sheet of a background art type, when the meshed sheet is used, a brush is liable to be caught by the mesh, and the contact resistance becomes excessively large. Therefore, a motor having a high torque is needed for moving the filter.
Further, according to Patent Reference 1, inside of the interior unit is provided with a filter cleaning portion including the dust box having the cleaning brush and the dust box is provided with a total of three portions of cleaning brushes of two cleaning brushes for cleaning a surface side (air suction port side) of the filter and one cleaning brush for cleaning a rear face side (heat exchanger side) thereof.
According thereto, by reciprocating the filter inward/outward of the interior unit by passing through the dust box, dust adhered to the filter is scraped off by the cleaning brush in the dust box and scraped dust can be stored in the dust box.
However, there is also a case in which according to the filter cleaning portion of the background art, at respective times of reciprocating the filter through the cleaning portion by a number of times, a tip of inclined brush is curled and a scraping effect thereof is reduced of time. [Patent Reference 1] JP-A-2004-28487